If you have been feeling a little nostalgic over the red Sharpie like I have, you will have been happy to discover that Emily (Emily VanCamp) has long been drawing big fat red crosses over those she cannot forgive. It looks like, though, that her own father was the first of many who fell victim to the red Sharpie, back when young Amanda (Emily Alyn Lind) believed her beloved father was a terrorist.

Now, all grown up and with revenge on her mind and in her heart, Emily’s past as Amanda continues to haunt her and the red Sharpie lives on.

Eli James: he said/she said

Eli (Collins Pennie) keeps us guessing – is he a good guy or a bad guy? He knows the truth about Emily – the whole truth. He suggests to Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) and Conrad (Henry Czerny) that they should use money raised through the Amanda Clarke Foundation (ACF) to help save Hayward House – the foster home that Amanda burned down during her stay there.

One moment, he appears to be scheming with Meredith Hayward (Dendrie Taylor), their abusive foster mother, to scam money off the Graysons and the ACF, and the next, he is publicly outing Meredith for how she abused all the children in her care over the years. And what of Meredith’s revelation that it was in fact Eli who had set Hayward House on fire, a crime for which young Amanda spent five years in juvie?

Can Nolan save Padma and her father?

Now we know Padma (Dilshad Vadsaria) didn’t hand over Nolan’s (Gabriel Mann) Carrion program to Trask (Burn Gorman) in exchange for her father – yet. She went into hiding but re-emerges when the Initiative sends her video proof that her father is still alive. They schedule an exchange, during which Aiden (Barry Sloane) plans to shoot the kidnappers as soon as they see her father. But part of the plan also involves Padma and her family leaving town with new identities, which Emily has already thoughtfully arranged. Neither Padma nor Nolan is happy with this plan as they declare their love for each other. (Aw, Nolan certainly deserves some true love and happiness, don’t you think?)

Things don’t go according to plan when the Initiative moves their exchange up and they end up driving away with Padma and Carrion. Nolan thought he was one step ahead of the kidnappers, installing a tracking device into the USB flash drive (a tortoise-shaped flash drive, no less – where can I get one?) which he gave to Padma to store Carrion on. Unfortunately, he continues to underestimate the bad guys and they turn the tables back on him, and now he has no Carrion, no Mr Lahari, and no Padma. Ah-oh!

Jack finds Kenny, thanks to Declan’s bump-and-lift

Jack (Nick Wechsler) so easily bought Nolan’s story about Kenny (JR Bourne) being the one who pulled him out of the water and saved his life after Kenny’s brother, Nate, shot him. Kenny is nowhere to be found, not even with Nolan’s fancy cyber-stalking skills. Thankfully, Declan (Connor Paolo) has a more low-tech method of finding one who does not want to be found – Trey Chandler (Michael Nardelli). If you’ve forgotten Trey, he’s the rich kid from school who plotted with Kenny to use Declan to help break into his own home to steal from his father. At school, Declan “bumps” into Trey, lifts his cell phone and uses it to send text messages to Kenny to arrange for a meeting, which Jack turns up to.

Jack confronts Kenny, who denies everything about owning the boat that was used to save his life and says that whatever Nate was scheming with Conrad, it was done without his participation or knowledge. But he does have some leverage against Conrad – apparently Nate secretly recorded all his conversations with Conrad, and one of them proves Conrad “practically ordering a hit on them.”

Jack Porter: the next “Joe the Plumber”

Remember the 2008 US election when McCain and Palin used “Joe the Plumber” to help get the “average American” to vote for them against Obama? Well, Conrad’s gubernatorial (sorry, I do enjoy using this word as much as Ashley does) campaign has taken a dive and needs whatever extra credit he can earn to get his polling numbers up. So he asks Jack to be his Joe, and after listening to Nate’s recording, Jack agrees – what better way to get close to your enemy than to pretend to be his friend, right?

Victoria does it again

Remember when Victoria paid some prison thug to give her own son a right royal beating in prison after he was accused of murdering Tyler last summer? She has a funny way of showing her love and protecting her son. This time, she sends Daniel a stalker-ish photo of him, having a secret lunch with Emily, and throws in a couple of bullets into the envelope for good measure so he would think that the Initiative are still monitoring his every move. Now that’s motherly love!

Emily’s past continues to haunt her, as will Victoria’s

Young Amanda grew up reading the lies Mason Treadwell (Roger Bart) wrote about her father, not knowing that he had been paid off by the Graysons to tell those lies. But it turns out her father had written her lots of letters while he was in prison, which her foster mother had kept hidden away from her. When Eli and Emily go back to their old foster home, Meredith does not recognize her. But it takes more than burning a house down to ever make Emily forget her days spent locked up in the cage-like hole-in-the-wall that Meredith hides behind a bookshelf in her basement.

Eli proves he can keep his promise to “young Amanda” to always look out for her and to make up for her paying for his crimes by serving Meredith a taste of her own medicine. And in the process, he discovers that Meredith had sold David Clarke’s letters to Mason. Emily pays the now-imprisoned biographer a visit to find the truth. Of course, those letters all went up in flames when she set Mason’s house on fire, but he knows what’s in them. And here’s the juiciest revelation of all: it turns out Victoria would have more empathy than anyone else at the plight of children in the foster care system. Turns out, as a sixteen year-old, she had given up her first-born son to foster care!

So just who is this son? Does Victoria have any more illegitimate children she has hidden somewhere? How will Emily use this as leverage against the Graysons? How will Daniel cope with finding out he has an elder brother? Is Padma’s father really still alive? Will Nolan and Aiden be able to get Padma back? And by the way, a tortoise flash drive? Seriously? It makes my IT friends’ R2D2 flash drives look totally boring by comparison.

Photo: ABC. Written by Valerie Leung. Share your Revenge theories with her on Twitter (@valshopaholic) and read her blog LibragirlRules.com.